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St. Francis Dam Disaster
Click image to enlarge Looking up at the west abutment and wing dike, from the broken base of the St. Francis Dam. 4x6-inch BW film transparency (larger than 4x5). Date, photographer and original purpose of photograph unknown. Compare to this series of images.
Construction on the 600-foot-long, 185-foot-high St. Francis Dam started in August 1924. With a 12.5-billion-gallon capacity, the reservoir began to fill with water on March 1, 1926. It was completed two months later. At 11:57:30 p.m. on March 12, 1928, the dam failed, sending a 180-foot-high wall of water crashing down San Francisquito Canyon. An estimated 411 people lay dead by the time the floodwaters reached the Pacific Ocean south of Ventura 5½ hours later. It was the second-worst disaster in California history, after the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, in terms of lives lost — and America's worst civil engineering failure of the 20th Century.
DI2813: 9600 dpi jpeg from original 4x6-inch transparency purchased 2015 by Sharon Divis. Transparency and 1.7GB archival scan on file. |
Dam & Reservoir
Floodpath, Rubble
Block 5
West Abutment
Empty Reservoir
Tombstone
Tombstone with Ladder x2
Climbing Tombstone
Visiting Tombstone
Picnic at Dam Site
Dam Rubble x2
Tombstone & Perimeter Road
Upended SPRR Track
Wrecked Farmhouse
PH-2 Reconstruction
PH-2 Reconstruction
PH-2 Reconstruction
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